Chernobyl entombment underway

Nearly 30 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (at the time, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), the accident site still has not been securely contained.

After the catastrophic event, almost a quarter of a million construction workers were employed to build a massive, specially designed metal-and-concrete structure—the “sarcophagus”—to cover over the damaged reactor, as reported at Gizmodo.com. However, the structure is decaying and efforts are now underway to build an even bigger protective structure over the current one, a $2 billion project that uses a protective metal shield called the New Safe Confinement, or NSC.

“One of the biggest engineering projects in history, it has been likened to a gigantic metal igloo, built to seal off hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel and dust buried inside,” said BBC News about the NSC.